House of Holland

Henry Holland and Aggy Deyn have turned the gossamer web of media celebrity into the safety net of a substantial career. (Their friends the Misshapes, who provided the music for the House of Holland show, are a transatlantic parallel.) The problem with that kind of success is that it's almost always the triumph of style over substance. I can't imagine Holland cares. To the most partisan crowd of London fashion week, who shrieked with glee at every passage, he offered up a full-tilt paean to Pantone. So Aggy was on first in a jacket, skinny pants, tights, and shoes, each item striped with different tones of green banded with white. Then came purple, pink, turquoise, and on and on. It was a fresh, graphic idea and it was best at its simplest, when Holland paraded his color schemes in a green sweatshirt dress, a jersey tee, or a cashmere leotard. He got into trouble when he tried "fashion" on for size, especially because it was another trip to that flashy corner of the eighties that we've already visited too often this season. Deyn's jacket had a boxy pagoda shoulder, for instance. There were wings of fabric on a skirt and a pair of baggy, pleated pants. God only knows which decade the Tibetan lamb "bustle" on a wool skirt reared up from. On the other hand, that same shaggy beast totally rocked out in a coat of graduated black, white, and gray. Call it a winsome lose-some situation.